American politics

Bias and truth

How not to raise the discourse

Jun 7th 2011, 22:13by W.W. | IOWA CITY

IN AN essay for "Academe Online", an organ of the American Association of University Professors, Eric Alterman bemoans the mere truthiness of journalism and think-tankery. Academics are relatively scrupulous in their quest for truth, Mr Alterman avers, but scrupulousness is often too slow-moving to help decide today's urgent debates about policy. Journalists, who have to move fast, have neither the time nor the expertise to adjudicate disputes, so they default to a shoddy impersonation of objectivity in which it is pretended that there are two sides to the story, whatever the story might be, and that the argument of each side is of roughly equal credibility. This practice obviously redounds to the benefit of shills and ideologues who speak from the back of their slacks. Meanwhile, think tanks imitate scholarly practices, but their evaluations of evidence and argument are predictably biased in the direction of the institutions' agenda. "[T]he upshot", Mr Alterman writes,

is that a well-funded, self-disciplined, and multifaceted attempt to replace what Lippmann termed the “pictures” in a public's “head” with new ones—ones that serve the ideological, political, financial, or personal interests of the author or the interests said author represents—are likely to succeed if practiced in a sustained, disciplined fashion in a variety of media simultaneously.

I think this is true, to a limited extent. The variety of competing ideologies as well as political, financial, and personal interests creates a natural check on the influence of any one perspective. But this is not the point Mr Alterman wishes to make. The point he wants to make is that well-funded right-wingers in particular have succeeded in collective mind-control:

[T]his is exactly what has happened in recent decades, as right-wing billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch, the Coors brothers, and, more recently, the Koch brothers have joined together with multinational corporations to shift the center of political gravity in our debate rightward on matters of economic, military, and social policy. They have been able to succeed, in part, because most academics who retain a commitment to intellectual scrupulousness have lost the ability to speak beyond their narrow disciplines to the larger public. At the same time, the growth of right-wing talk radio, cable news, and a bevy of well-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University have overwhelmed what remains of their less ideologically committed counterparts, such as the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to say nothing of the advantage they enjoy over genuinely liberal organizations such as the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute and the more recently created Center for American Progress.

Let's stop and ask what kind of statement this is. Though it appears in a publication for academics, this is not a scholarly argument. Mr Alterman does not attempt to quantify in any systematic (or even unsystematic) way the combined effect of Scaife, Murdoch, Coors, and Koch money on public opinion. He attempts no fair accounting of the sources of left-wing money, and presents no evidence whatsoever for the implicit claim that right-wing money has had a greater effect on public opinion than left-wing money. Mr Alterman does not appear to rise even to the standards of ideological think-tankery. There are no footnotes to lend his argument a patina of pseudo-scholarly authority. This is speculative ideological just-so-storytelling. It could be true. I don't claim that it isn't, only that I doubt it. It could be true that once one fairly takes into account the combined effect of left-wing money in academia, media, and so forth, the left edges out the right in overall influence on public opinion. Maybe it's a push. I don't know, and neither does Mr Alterman. It's the sort of thing you need actual evidence to speak intelligently about. Isn't Mr Alterman the very thing he bemoans?

In any case, as a veteran of the Cato Institute, I can tell you that the institute has had precious little success in ending the "war on drugs", preventing the erosion of civil liberties, keeping America out of land wars in Asia, or changing Social Security into a forced-savings programme, among many other things, despite the many tens of millions poured into these projects. I assume these failures are due, in no small part, to countervailing influences on public opinion, from both left and right. The way public opinion actually emerges from the complex clash of idea-peddling forces is a tricky business that deserves inquiry more serious and less partial than Mr Alterman is interested in.

One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.

What sort of statement is "Around half of self-identified Republicans are complete idiots"? America's voting-age population is about 225m. About a third, 74m or so, are self-described Republicans. So, according to Mr Alterman, at least 37m Americans are "complete idiots". But that can't be all the American idiots there are, can it? No doubt some healthy portion of self-identified Democrats and independents are also complete idiots. I don't know whether there are more or less completely idiotic Democrats than Republicans, but I do imagine they are numerous enough that Democratic candidates must pander to them. I suppose one could appear in the MSM and say that without the support of the poorly-educated urban poor, Democrats would be sunk. However, if one insisted on calling these voters "complete idiots", I imagine one would be branded as some sort of bigot. Would that really be so bad?

Anyway, forget all that. I take the thrust of Mr Alterman's argument to be this: the MSM is biased against the left and not to be trusted. So then who is to be trusted? Eric Alterman, I guess. He's in luck. My sense of the political science literature is that the effect of this sort of thing is to decrease trust in the MSM and push media consumers more and more toward explicitly ideological sources of information, such as the Nation, where the already progressive reader will find Mr Alterman arguing that "Republicans are in thrall to liars and lunatics serving as a smoke screen for a conservative class war against the poor and middle class ..." and cheer. No doubt this sort of thing offsets some of the influence of competing right-wing propaganda mongers, but I do doubt that this sort of thing otherwise improves the American public's relationship to truth.